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To many, Vice is a salacious, youth-oriented magazine focused on
sex, drugs and hard-partying that anyone can pick up for free at
American Apparel. And they’re not wrong. but Vice has also been
not-so-quietly building a digital news empire, covering
everything from illegal escape attempts from North Korea to the
epidemic of unsafe butt enhancement procedures in the United
States.

It’s stories like these that don’t get much coverage from
mainstream outlets -- stories that Vice goes after because
they're what young people care about.

“When we first started doing news everyone told us, in
established media and legacy media, ‘Young people don’t care
about news. American youth don’t care about international news,'”
founder Shane Smith said yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt
conference in New York City. “We didn’t believe that.”

Before diving head first into building out what Smith refers to
as a “platform agnostic” news network, Vice simply asked its
audience what kind of coverage it wanted through a Twitter
hashtag campaign. What it found seemed to contradict everything
everyone else was saying. Readers from all over the world
replied, hungry for reports from war and disaster zones, on
humanitarian issues and climate change.

Its bold move is paying off. Smith says Vice is one of the most
successful brands on YouTube with the highest engagement time,
highest watch time, best subscription rates and video completion
rates.

“What we found is Gen Y is absolutely consumed with news. They
love news. It’s one of their biggest passion points. The problem
is they’ve been disenfranchised by traditional media. If the
fourth estate was doing its job, Vice would not be purveying
news, Vice would not be one of the fastest growing news companies
in the world. Why? Because they should be good at doing what
they’re doing,” Smith said. “People are watching 28 minutes on
YouTube, all on our news stuff.”

When asked, Smith, said he would like to be the Rupert Murdoch of
his generation, but added he'd "do things differently,” garnering
chuckles from the audience. “Whenever I view success, I’m dressed
as Mozart on an island.”

While Smith gleefully pokes fun at the aging media empires, he’ll
also happily take their money. Vice recently sold a five percent
stake to 21st Century Fox for $70 million.

Vice isn’t planning on giving up any of its hard-partying image
anytime soon, but it’s clear that Smith is serious about growing
his digital media empire into the world’s leading source for
news. It's that counterculture image and straightforward heir of
authenticity that has brought Vice the success its enjoyed so far
and it will likely continue to work so well for the foreseeable
future.

Smith says Vice averages roughly 165 million video views each
month but he wants to see that number skyrocket into the
billions.

"We won't be the next ESPN or CNN or MTV. We'll be 10 times that
size," he said.

Smith, 43 founded Vice with two partners in 1994 as a local
Montreal magazine. Twenty years later, he’s got a considerable
amount of gray in his beard but he says he isn’t even close to
tired. If anything, it’s more fun than it’s ever been.

“When you’re a younger company you struggle, struggle, struggle
with how are we going to pay the bills, and how are we going to
hire people, and how are we going to get a bigger office. Just
managing the company is so hard," he said. "Spike Jonze said,
'Take money out of the equation. What would you do if you didn’t
care about the money?’ This is what I would do."

More than anything, Smith wants to keep Vice sharp and evolving.

“I hope young people come up and try to eat my lunch because that
means there's going to be a frothy beautiful contentious platform
where everybody’s going after each other, which I believe leads
to honest and a better quality product. The problem that we’ve
had is four media companies run media, globally. And some say
they’re on the right and some say they’re on the left; look,
they’re all afraid of losing Ford as a client. So they’re all, by
definition, huge companies that are going to be inherently
conservative.”